Time-lapse Video as a Reflection Tool for Collaborative Design
To become an effective design engineer, students must learn to work collaboratively in teams and participate in group activities, such as brainstorming, cooperative design, prototyping, testing, and evaluation. To support the learning of such team-based processes, students often engage in short design challenges in which teams work to solve a hands-on problem posed by an instructor. Upon completion of the challenge, students are often asked to reflect upon their experiences and evaluate their group dynamics, their time management, and their design process. A common problem is that students often have a hard time objectively assessing the behavior of their group.
To address this problem, Dr. Louis Rosenberg has been employing time-lapse video as a novel pedagogical intervention for enhancing student reflection in group design experiences. Under the protocol, students are video-taped during a multi-hour design challenge using a time-lapse technology that compresses time; for example, turning a 90-minute design challenge into a 60-second high-speed video. By watching the high-speed video of their own collaborative efforts, students have been found to more readily recognize patterns of behavior that they otherwise would have missed, becoming more insightful when assessing group dynamics, division of labor, time management, and the stages of design.
Contact: Dr. Louis Rosenberg
Phone: 805-756-5464
Email: lrosenbe@calpoly.edu